Graphics Cards Guide

Celebrity Endorsed

Celebrity Endorsed

In the fledgling world of professional gaming, where players slaughter each other in virtual arenas for prize money, there is no doubt that Jonathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendel is one of its brightest stars. Not everyone will agree that he's the best player in first person shooter (FPS) games but he is extremely competitive (we personally saw him ruthlessly demolishing a hapless member of the audience at Computex 2007) and for a certainty, he is the most famous after been featured in mainstream media like Time Magazine and 60 Minutes.

This celebrity status has been assiduously translated into numerous endorsements for Wendel, with companies like Universal abit, Creative, XFX and Zalman (collectively known as Fatal1ty Brand Partners), choosing to associate their products with the Fatal1ty name so as to appeal to the gaming fraternity. Ranging from gaming peripherals like keyboards and headphones to motherboards, sound and graphics cards, all these products claim to be either co-developed or game-tested by Wendel.

With that many products involved, there have been understandably some hits and misses among them (we'll stick to our Logitech and Razer mice, thank you). However, that has not stopped graphics vendor XFX from renewing its Fatal1ty series of cards, upgrading it to the latest GPU from NVIDIA. The company had previously released a Fatal1ty branded GeForce 7600 GT graphics card and it seems that the time has come to unleash a GeForce 8600 GT version for the upcoming DirectX 10 game releases. Interestingly enough, like the older version, this new card will be both overclocked and passively cooled and is squarely targeted at the mid-range segment due to its GeForce 8600 GT core. If you had thought that an elite gamer would only be looking at the high-end cards, Fatal1ty is probably proving us all wrong. Without further ado, here's a glimpse of this attractive looking card followed by the dry technical bits.